In 1993, the Clinton administration proposed a significant government-run health care reform package. Clinton had mentioned various socialized health care schemes in the 1992 election, and despite prohibitions on nepotism set up a task force headed by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, to come up with a "comprehensive plan" to enforce universal socialized health care on all Americans, which in addition to the gay agenda was a cornerstone of the administration's first-term. Various documents relating to the how the Task Force spent government funds still as of yet have not been disclosed.

The recommendation, announced by President Bill Clinton in an address to Congress on September 22, 1993, consisting largely of buzzwords and slogans developed through focus groups with a complex and complicated proposal running more than 1,000 pages. The plan called for an enforced mandate on job producers to withhold the cost of health insurance coverage equal to one-eighth of the national income from workers paychecks by funneling money to closely-regulated health maintenance organizations (HMOs). The plan dubbed "Hillary Care", was initially well-received by liberal political leaders and socialist political commentators, and it seemed likely to pass through the Democratic-controlled Congress.

As the mid-term elections approached the plan was defeated because it was overly bureaucratic and restrictive of patient choice. The effort to bring about rejection of the legislation included minimal advertising criticizing the plan, including the famous Harry and Louise ad, which depicted a middle-class couple despairing over the plan's bureaucratic nature.

Meanwhile, Democrats, instead of uniting behind the President's original proposal, offered a number of competing plans of their own. Some criticized the plan from the left, preferring a Canadian-style single payer system.

On September 26, 1994, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell announced that the plan was dead and did not even bother holding a vote on the bill to force Senators to go on record. The defeat weakened Clinton politically, and contributed to widespread public frustration with the remnants of New Deal socialism. In the 1994 election, the Republican revolution gave the GOP control of both houses of Congress, ending the threat of a Clinton-sponsored health care scheme. Many political commentators remarked the success of the Republican Party in the post-Soviet era was the result of the revelation of the Clinton Administration being so out of step with the country by proposing to move towards socialism and restrict health care choice at the very moment the failures of socialism were so evident worldwide.